“I graduated a year early because the Olympics were coming up and I wanted to try my best to be able to compete in them. I went straight on ahead with training; he stayed in school to finish like normal. That summer I came home for a weekend because I’d been at the big training facility they have in Colorado, and out of the blue, he told me he was leaving for Oregon. I talked to him on the phone every two or three days for months before that, and he never hinted that he was thinking about leaving. He never said a word. I felt so betrayed. I trusted him, and he kept that from me, you know? I didn’t keep anything from him. I wouldn’t have cared if he’d just said something, fucking anything, but it was like he kept it a secret on purpose to hurt me. Then a few weeks later, I slipped and broke my wrist the day of the opening ceremony.”

I had to roll my eyes as I thought about how much I had cried, thinking I was getting away with hiding my heartbreak even though apparently Peter and Grandpa Gus had known from the fucking beginning. I’d been so stupid. Of course they had known.

“He left, and he never reached out to me once he was gone. Not even a fucking picture message after he’d spent every other weekend at my house for just about fifteen years. He came back for Christmas break, and I made it a point not to see him even though he went by Maio House almost daily. Grandpa Gus and Peter were both on my team, I realize that now, and lied for me every time. And when that following summer rolled around, I saw him, but by then, I was going full steam ahead with competing, and I was taking a couple classes at the university, and he’d quit judo, and that felt like another kick to my fucking balls. And that next year, he called me twice in twelve months, can you believe that? Twice.

“And, I guess to wrap the next ten years up, I think he grew up a tiny bit and realized what he’d done and tried his best to be my friend again, but I was over it. It was the beginning of the end. Four years after telling me he was going to leave, he broke my fucking rib when I came home again from Colorado, like a dumbass, and even though I know it was my fault for putting myself in that position, I was still mad at him. I know I’m a hypocrite. Our friendship was never the same again. I tried to be there for him when I could, but it was totally different.

“And you know the rest. I went to France and came back pregnant. Grandpa, Peter, and I decided to keep it a secret for the first few months, and then one day, when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to hide it anymore, and I was scared as hell and sad and pretty fucking pissed off at you for ghosting me, I finally put on a tight shirt that showed off the whole grain loaf I was baking in the oven and everyone saw.

“An hour later, he showed up while I was in the office doing some accounting work, and just… tried to rip me a new one. How the hell could I be pregnant? How could I do something so stupid? Why wouldn’t I tell him who the dad was? Where the hell was the dad? Why would I do this to him? Blah, blah, blah, like he had any say in my life. I almost went to jail that day, Jonah. I was going to rip his nipples off and stuff them down his throat. He made me feel like a slut. This asshole who went through girls like they were toilet paper after he took a shit made me feel like I had done something unforgivable. This prick who hadn’t been a real friend to me in a decade made me feel like trash.”

Mo decided to put her hand on my thigh, like she could sense my frustrations from before she’d even been born, and I couldn’t help but drop a kiss on the back of her head, seeing the fucking finish line of this shitshow of a story and sprinting toward the end. “I didn’t say anything to him, for the record. My hormones were crazy then, and I guess I was in shock, but it made me cry, and I don’t ever cry. And the next day, Grandpa Gus called and told me that Noah had cleaned out his locker at Maio House. Two days later, he posted a picture on his Picturegram that he’d joined a new family at a gym in New Mexico.”

Jonah, who had been sitting on the edge of the bed, slowly melted off the edge, sliding down and down and down until he sat directly in front of me, his long legs crossed, his knees bracketing my own. But it was his facial expression that made me swallow and blink. Noah hadn’t hurt my feelings in a long time, but the look on Jonah’s face had something churning inside of me.

It was a scowl for sure, and it was sad for sure, but it was mad and something else I couldn’t completely understand, and those honey-colored eyes were totally and completely focused on me.

Then, then, it was then that those big, rough, tan hands came to my face, cupping one cheek in each, and he leaned forward, and I leaned forward too for some reason, until our foreheads touched, and I could smell Mo from how close she was. And Jonah kept us like that. Foreheads touching. His breath and mine mixing together. His hands on my face, gentle and comforting and sweet. And his voice was a low wave as he asked, “And what happened after that?”

I stared at the freckles on his cheeks as I answered. “He called me a few days later and tried to apologize. I answered because I told myself that I wasn’t him. That I hadn’t done anything wrong and I wasn’t going to hide from his hypocritical ass. He said that he loved me, that he had always supposedly loved me, but he was full of shit—you don’t have to squeeze my cheeks so tight, hey—and he tried to claim that he thought he would be the one who would give me kids one day and that he was hurt and confused and a bunch of other bullshit.

“Stop holding your breath, Dimples. I’m telling you the truth. He was jealous, and for some reason, he had the impression that my dumb ass was sitting around and waiting for him to decide he wanted to settle down. But now he couldn’t, and it was my fault because I hadn’t loved him enough in return. For the record, I’d never given him a single impression that I cared about him like that. He didn’t know about what I’d felt in high school, so that even more so didn’t make sense.

“Anyway, he got mad when I called him out on why that was stupid. You know, like there hadn’t been a thousand girls over the years and like our friendship hadn’t devolved to the point we only spoke to each other if he wanted or needed my help once he’d started doing MMA at Maio House. Then he hung up, and I didn’t hear from him again until you showed up.

“Grandpa Gus refuses to speak to him, and after knowing and training with Peter for most of his life, all he gets out of him is distant politeness. And I know that chafes his ass big-time. I know it. It’s easy for people to love you when you’re doing things for them, when they get something out of it. But it isn’t so easy to find people who will still love you when you’re down and need help getting up. That’s when you really find out who’s with you for the right reasons.

“My best friend, Luna, told me once that everyone has a threshold for what they’re willing to forgive. That you can forgive someone but never forget what they said, and you shouldn’t. A real friend wouldn’t have said and done the things he did. So if you are getting jealous”—I looked right into those bright eyes and smiled at him because he was still looking sick and pissed and jealous, and I was eating that shit up—“there’s no reason for you to do that.”

All I could manage to do was feel the soft puff of his breaths on my lips as he breathed long and deep, and I couldn’t begin to imagine what was going on in his head. So when he spoke next, the last thing I expected was to hear strain in his tone. “I left you too, Lenny. I never said those ugly words, but I wasn’t there when you needed me either. I reckon that might be worse.”

Honesty is a funny thing. It’s brutal and wonderful at the same time, somehow. And it was the best response he could have ever given me, and that was how I knew how totally and completely different Jonah was from Noah. They weren’t even in the same country together.

“Yeah, you did, and you’re a dipshit for that, but you didn’t know I needed you,” I replied carefully. “That’s the difference. He knew and he didn’t give a shit. You were an idiot, but you left because you were worried that your own life was basically over. Yet, you came back, even if it took you almost two years, you asshole.”

He made a noise in his nose that might have been in amusement or pain. Both, knowing him. Definitely both.

“I thought my life was over when I found out I was pregnant, and if I could have run away, I would have. So I get it. But you wouldn’t have disappeared if you’d known, right?” I made myself ask, and I got my answer by him shaking his forehead against mine.

“Not for anything.” One of the hands on my cheeks moved to rest on the nape of my neck, cupping it, his breathing getting even deeper. “I’d like to have a word or two with this arsehole, if it’s possible.”

Fourteen words were all it took to change my fucking life.

To tip my face up. To say fuck it and press my lips against his for the first time in so long. It was just a second, then two, of my mouth pressed against his like it was my first kiss before I pulled back.

But he followed my retreat. Jonah’s mouth dipped back to mine, his warm lips against my own, so soft, so lingering. I’d look back on that moment and think that it was the most intimate kiss of my entire fucking life. No tongue. No sexual shit at all. Just long, endless touches of our lips meeting in lingering pecks. Kisses on the corners of my mouth, over the bow of it, just below my bottom lip, and more and more and more and more across them.